The Problem of the Infinite Spiral

by reichorn

“And it is surely just silly to tell us, when we are trying to discover what knowledge is, that it is correct judgment accompanied by knowledge…”

— Plato, Theaetetus

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This is my third post as a guest-blogger here at the TPB. The usual spiel about me: My name is Roger Eichorn. I’m a friend of Scott’s, an aspiring fantasy novelist, and a Ph.D. student in philosophy at the University of Chicago.

So I’ve spent the entirety of the past week laid up with the flu—a real beast, knocked me out cold (so to speak). Whilst languishing in a medicated fog, unable to do any real philosophical work—I’m supposed to be (re-)reading both Hegel’s Phenomenologyand Kant’s first Critique… let’s pause a moment to ponder that bit of insanity—I’ve been dwelling on my usual philosophical hang-ups: knowledge, justification, and truth.

Skepticism, in other words.

Through the fog, a number of nagging thoughts have come into focus for me. For one, there’s the tension between these two facts: (1) philosophy students are always told that ‘knowledge’ (at least, properly reflective, respectable, philosophical knowledge) is ‘justified true belief.’ That is, the difference between merely believing something and knowing it is that, in the case of knowing, one possesses a justification that bridges the gap between ‘thought’ (belief) and ‘truth’ (the world); (2) Stewart Cohen’s observation that “[t]he acceptance of fallibilism in epistemology is virtually universal.”

Fallibilism is the view that, since we’re fallible beings, any of our beliefs might be wrong. Fallibilists will maintain, then, that knowledge does not entail truth. We can possess knowledge of x even if x is (turns out to be) false. It does seem that fallibilism is widely accepted. Why is it widely accepted? Because it’s thought that ‘infallibilism’ cannot avoid skepticism. One often hears that the ‘quest for certainty’ is outmoded, based as it is on an artificially inflated epistemic standard. Knowledge does not require certainty; it deals rather with probabilities.

Why, then, are philosophy students still told that knowledge is ‘justified true belief’? And why does the ‘justified true belief’ formulation still pop up so often in epistemological discussions? For a fallibilist, knowledge is merely justified belief; it needn’t be true.

The answer to these questions, of course, is that philosophers don’t agree even on what they’re talking about when they talk about knowledge. Now, I think—along with contextualists and Wittgensteinians—that it’s foolish to think that ‘knowledge’ is a univocal concept. If we look at how the word is used, it’s easy enough to see that there are times that, when we attribute ‘knowledge’ to someone, we’re attributing to her merely justified belief. For example:

Knowledge about tomorrow’s weather might derive, say, from consulting weather.com. Might it turn out that it doesn’t rain tomorrow? Of course. What we mean when we ask someone, in this sort of context, if they know what the weather is going to be like tomorrow, is something like: “Have you checked weather.com?” A fallibilist would say that consulting weather.com (or whatever) is not only a local standard by which we judge whether someone has knowledge about tomorrow’s weather; they would also say that consulting some such source makes it significantly more probable that their belief about tomorrow’s weather will turn out to be true. Weather.com is (ceteris paribus) generally agreed to be reliable.

It’s different in other cases, though. Take a much-discussed example: a lottery ticket. The chances of any given lottery ticket turning out to be a winning ticket are miniscule. Vanishingly small. Yet, prior to the drawing, would we want to say, “I know this ticket won’t win”? Well, I can imagine some circumstance in which we’d say something like that; what we’d mean is, “I find it impossible to believe that this ticket will win.” The person who says that they know a lottery ticket won’t win is still likely to keep the ticket—because, after all, it just might be a winner!

The chances of weather.com being wrong are far higher than the chances of any given lottery ticket being a winner. So appeals to probability aren’t sufficient to account for our knowledge-attribution practices. Rather, I think we should simply accept that, in the one case, we treat ‘knowledge’ as ‘justified belief,’ while in the other, we treat it as ‘justified true belief.’

Now, I want to suggest that either conception of knowledge (fallibilist or infallibilist) falls prey to one of the fundamental challenges posed by Pyrrhonian skepticism (which I discussed in my previous twoposts). Let’s focus on fallibilist knowledge, since it’s the weaker of the two.

Knowledge, according to the fallibilist, is justified belief. This means that one knows x just in case (i) one believes x, and (ii) x is justified. But how are we to construe (ii)? I want to suggest that there are three main ways to do so:

Non-epistemically = “I believe that x is justified.”

Externalistically = “X is justified” (without the subject knowing or believing that it is)

Epistemically = “I know that x is justified.”

The non-epistemic option is surely insufficient for knowledge. It cannot be enough simply to believe that one’s belief is justified; it must be the case that one’s belief actually be justified.

The externalist view (which I discussed earlier) itself comes in two forms.

Uninformative = “X is justified, but no one knows how or why.”

Informative = “X is justified (though the subject is unaware of this fact) on the basis of y.”

Now, the uninformative response is, well, uninformative. It comes down to the claim that xmight be justified in some way. The informative response, though, turns ‘externalism’ into a kind of third-personal internalism: “Beatrice isn’t aware that her belief x is justified, but I can see that in fact it is.” But now this informative ‘externalist’ response must itself be interpreted either non-epistemically or epistemically. The non-epistemic interpretation—“I (merely) believe that Beatrice’s belief x is justified on the basis of y”—is surely not enough for knowledge.

So we’re left, at one level or another, with the epistemic interpretation of justification: “I know that x is justified.” But now we’ve begged the question, for the question was: “What is knowledge?” It is, as Plato pointed out long ago, silly to say that knowledge is belief plus knowledge. For not only is this circular, it also opens onto an infinite regress, for our knowledge that x is justified would itself require a justification, as would that justification, and so on. Circularity plus infinite regress yields what I’ve christened “the infinite spiral.”

Even fallibilist accounts of knowledge, then, fall prey to the Pyrrhonian skeptical dialectic. In order to know something, you must already know something.

This is where the coherentist—or the Hegelian, for that matter—would step in with a complex account of how the hanging-together of our beliefs serves to justify them. I suggested earlier that coherence theories cannot be theories of truth, since they serve, at best, merely to make beliefs more probable. But if fallibilism is right, then knowledge simply is a matter of probabilities, in which case coherence may work as an account of fallibilistic knowledge.

Even if that’s right, it seems to me that such accounts are merely concessions to, rather than refutations of, skepticism. To quote Stewart Cohen again:

The acceptance of fallibilism derives from the widely held view that what we seek in constructing a theory of knowledge is an account that squares with our strong intuition that we know many things… [W]hile the entailment principle [i.e., the principle that knowledge entails truth] may look attractive in the abstract, it does not command the kind of assent sufficient to withstand the overwhelming case against it provided by our everyday intuitions concerning what we know. Any residual worry associated with denying the principle is far outweighed by our common sense rejection of its skeptical consequences.

In other words, fallibilism begins by presupposing that skepticism must be wrong. Since maintaining that knowledge is justified true belief seems to lead inexorably to skepticism, we must mean something else by ‘knowledge.’ To the extent that it is more than an acknowledgement that we sometimes use the word ‘knowledge’ to mean (merely) justified belief, fallibilism represents retreat and retrenchment, not the vanquishing of the dread enemy. Furthermore, it utterly fails to account for the stronger sense of ‘knowledge’ that we also make use of and which is best captured by means of the entailment principle.

The larger worry here is that, by putting philosophy in the business of confirming our ‘commonsense intuitions,’ we risk reducing it to the role of sociocultural apologetics. In science, hypotheses can be proven wrong. But can our commonsense intuitions be proven wrong? No, not qua commonsense intuitions. And where do our commonsense intuitions come from? An ounce of sensitivity to the historical or anthropological record is enough to make highly plausible the claim that they are, at least in a great many cases, cultural artifacts.

Yes, human beings think they ‘know’ all sorts of things. But do we? Well, as we’ve seen, that depends on what we mean by ‘know.’ Did the ancient slave-owning Greek know that he is inherently superior to his slaves? In the fallibilist sense, yes, he did. Just as we say that someone ‘knows’ what tomorrow’s weather is going to be like because she’s consulted weather.com, so the Greek slave-owner had a culturally sanctioned and accepted standard with reference to which his belief that he is inherently superior to his slaves was justified.

Of course, we’re going to want to say that these cases differ because weather.com actually is reliable regarding tomorrow’s weather, whereas myths or oracles (or whatever) are epistemically unreliable. I agree, of course. But notice that this response turns on an appeal to truth. When we’re talking about knowledge, it is foolhardy to bracket out the question of what is and is not true–which is precisely what, at the end of the day, the fallibilist wants to do.

Moreover, the more general point is that philosophy should not be in the business of simply accepting our commonsense intuitions, of using them as an unmoving foundation. In other words, philosophy should not be in the business of ‘rationally reconstructing’ our commonsense intuitions. Why not? Because no doubt many such intuitions are wrong! ‘Rational reconstruction’ becomes mere rationalization.

Such is the case, I want to argue, when it comes to our commonsense intuitions regarding what (or how much) we know. Yes, we sometimes attribute knowledge to someone in a loose, or weak, sense. But we also have a strong conception of knowledge, one we deploy—usually without being aware of it—all the time. This strong conception is brought out by adding into the fallibilist conception of knowledge the standard account of belief (an account, by the way, that I think captures a ‘natural attitude,’ but which is not properly speaking an analysis of belief), namely, that to believe x is to believe that x is true. This reintroduces ‘truth’ into the fallibilist picture, yielding the following.

A person knows x just in case (i) she believes that x is true, and (ii) x is justified.

The worry, in other words, is that people are naturally inclined to equate what they believe with what is true. Fallibilism wants to introduce modesty into the picture by eschewing the ‘entailment principle,’ but the fact remains that without a thoroughgoing course of skeptical therapy, all belief is going to entail a belief in the truth of the belief. If philosophy is rendered unable to illuminate for us how far we fall from our epistemic ideals, then it robs itself of what I take to be the source of its greatest potential benefit to human beings and the world. It is precisely by being cured of the reflex to think our beliefs true—which often means: to be cured of the reflex to think in terms of knowing—in which lies the great transformative potential of a philosophical education.

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25 Comments to “The Problem of the Infinite Spiral”

Hi Mr Eichorn! It’s a pleasure to have you posting here – I’m really looking forward to your novel, and it’s great to read your philosophical writing. I agree with your “skeptical therapy” program, but there’s a couple of objections I’d like to raise.

You claim the philosophy students are “always told that knowledge is Justified True Belief”. I don’t think that’s the case – even as a mindless drone undergraduate in a third-rate town, JTBA was presented to me as a traditional conception of knowledge, not as a live definition. Indeed, one should be onto Gettier examples and the Regress problem by the end of the first lecture, unless the prof is asleep. I suppose it’s possible that somewhere out there there’s someone shilling JTB to unsuspecting newbs, but it isn’t “always” happening, at least if my experience counts.

Second, while I agree that the folk conception of knowledge is an incoherent and unsupportable respresentationalist mess, that can’t really be an issue, can it? I mean, we’re talking about the FOLK here – their concept of truth can’t really be expected to be any less flawed than their implicit dualist metaphysics, or their strongly Cartesian theory of mind. I’d love to see you take on a harder target than folk misconceptions – people who can hardly tie their own shoes without a Personal Life Coach and a government grant aren’t worthy subjects for someone of your talents.

Alas, I’m still finding my way clear of the flu-induced fog that’s swallowed the past week+ of my life. Let me see if I can respond in a way that makes sense…

You’re right to say that the justified true belief (JTB) definition of knowledge is ‘traditional’ more than ‘live’ — but it’s still live in many corners, it seems to me. (Of course, how one is taught this stuff depends on one’s teacher. Sweeping generalizations are bound to be wrong in many cases. Mea culpa.) It does seem to me, though, that plenty of philosophers — widespread fallibilism notwithstanding — continue to treat JTB as, in principle, at least the correct starting point for defining knowledge. Chisholm is the obvious example here. For him, knowledge is JTB plus… a hundred other clauses to make it air-tight. And it seems to me that Gettier problems are only ‘problems’ for those who accept the JTB conception. Most attempts to respond to Gettier follow the Chisholm JTB+ model, that is, Gettier problems are taken to point to the need for something in addition to JTB, rather than to the need to jettison ‘the entailment principle.’

You might have guessed from my post that I’m quite convinced that JTB is indeed on the right track, that fallibilism captures at best only one dimension of ‘knowledge.’ I think most people would find that the following sentence has an air of paradox about it: “I know that the house across the street from me is made of yellow bricks — but I might be wrong.”

Anyway… You bring up an interested point about Folk vs. Non-Folk. What’s immediately striking is that you attribute to the ‘folk’ sophisticated philosophical conceptions, e.g., “dualistic metaphysics,” a “Cartesian theory of mind.” I’m actually with you on this — I think the relationship between philosophy and what I call (following Hume) ‘common life’ — is complex and reciprocal. This actually connects with things I say in my post: our ‘commonsense intuitions’ are cultural products. What we take to be ‘common sense’ (often marked by the character of so-called ‘self-evidence’) can be traced back to the influence of philosophical thinking. Conceptions that were once contested and hard-won become our inheritance, simple givens. This suggests, though, that there’s a level at which the ‘Folk/Non-folk’ dichotomy collapses.

Finally, I thought my target was not so much ‘Folk metaphysics’ as such, but rather the relationship between philosophy and intuitions, esp. the conception of philosophy as in the business of vindicating common sense, of using common sense as an unimpeachable standard of truth.

Well this seems to be describing a method of thinking. It isn’t? I don’t know what else there are but methods of thinking?

I’m going the literal route and think curing is what you meant (and I’m actually asking the question). If it isn’t, I guess I’m going for a technical reading myself on such matters – and technical readings are just literal ones. If some sort of poetic reading is required, okay I wasn’t looking at it that way, I’ll grant.

The worry, in other words, is that people are naturally inclined to equate what they believe with what is true. Fallibilism wants to introduce modesty into the picture by eschewing the ‘entailment principle,’ but the fact remains that without a thoroughgoing course of skeptical therapy, all belief is going to entail a belief in the truth of the belief. If philosophy is rendered unable to illuminate for us how far we fall from our epistemic ideals, then it robs itself of what I take to be the source of its greatest potential benefit to human beings and the world. It is precisely by being cured of the reflex to think our beliefs true—which often means: to be cured of the reflex to think in terms of knowing—in which lies the great transformative potential of a philosophical education.

It’s just that ‘curing’ seems to be ‘curing’ from the perspective of a particular yardstick (to use TPB parlance). Not that I wouldn’t mind it being curing – people seem to state subjective perspectives as if they were stating galactic truths all the time. But even though they seem to contradict each other all the time, how can I be sure they are wrong and need curing? Or how can I be sure some of them aren’t somehow clued into some great truth? Not that I choose to believe they are, but just as equally I can’t quite choose to believe they would all be ‘cured’. What tipped you over to the later? (if you want to say the huge number of muderous wars based on people treating their subjective as galactic truth, yeah, I find that a strong reason/heavy weight on one side of the scales myself)

You and I have come to conversational impasses before over an issue that I think arises again here: the first-order, second-order distinction.

Nowhere have I presented myself as uttering “galactic truths.” But it’s also not that I’m merely stating “subjective perspectives.” To see the dichotomy in those terms, while understandable, is too simplistic. You’re missing the deeper, dialectical dimension here. What skepticism shows is that various epistemological edifices are built on sand: they fail to achieve knowledge, or realize truth, according to their very own standards. It’s not a question of knowing — being ‘sure’ — that all dogmatic claims are wrong or that they’re not ‘clued into some great truth.’ The question is a second-order question: how can we establish a reflective relation to such knowledge or truth even if they were available to us?

The skeptical problem, in other words, is a second-order problem about first-order beliefs or knowledge-claims. It does not entail adopting any first-order position. The ‘cure,’ as I try to say in my earlier posts on Pyrrhonism, involves a change of attitude toward one’s own beliefs; the ‘cure’ involves an alteration in one’s second-order beliefs, one’s beliefs about one’s beliefs.

As I say in this post, we are all of us in the state of ‘natural consciousness’ most of the time, i.e., most of the time, we can’t help but take our first-order beliefs — and the presuppositions that frame them — to be immediately certain, immediately known. That’s fine. What I’m trying to say is that, even given those everyday commitments, we’re still free to adopt any number of second-order attitudes toward those commitments. Are these second-order commitments “galactic truths”? No. Are they then merely “subjective perspectives”? No, they’re not that either.

The ‘cure’ is not the conclusion of an argument, because it can only be effected at a level deeper than arguments, at the level of that which makes argumentation possible — what Kant called ‘the transcendental.’

The ‘cure,’ as I try to say in my earlier posts on Pyrrhonism, involves a change of attitude toward one’s own beliefs; the ‘cure’ involves an alteration in one’s second-order beliefs, one’s beliefs about one’s beliefs.
Okay – so, to alter those second order beliefs – does one pursue that altering as a second order belief or as a first order belief, in pursuing it?

Let me pitch it as a story, rather than proposition: a story where you have a character who’s changing his second order beliefs, but he’s doing so because of a first order belief. But he can’t see that – his actions (at a mental level) turn upon the first orders belief’s fundimentals of why these second order beliefs should change. I’ll spoil the story a bit and say the first order belief has him call this a ‘cure’ to the second order beliefs. The reason I say it’s a story, is to ask if the character seems possible at all? Or does it seem an impossible character (heck, my imagination can sometimes go frikken a bit nuts, so maybe it is impossible, I’ll totally grant!)?

If it does sound possible, that doesn’t mean anything about it’s relevance. But it does make an interesting contrast, doesn’t it?

David Clark wrote:
“we’re talking about the FOLK here – their concept of truth can’t really be expected to be any less flawed than their implicit dualist metaphysics, or their strongly Cartesian theory of mind”

Roger wrote:
“sophisticated philosophical conceptions”

This makes me wonder what the baseline human position is, you know, if you could somehow isolate a person from greater culture and figure out a way to communicate with them. Are we born with ‘implicit dualist metaphysics’ or do we somehow aquire it through religion/language/culture?

Most seemed to have at least vaguely dualistic concepts (some kind of experience occurs after the death of the body) but determinism (or at least fatalism, which is not the same) seems more common in ancient folklore than in modern times.

Roger wrote:
““I know that the house across the street from me is made of yellow bricks — but I might be wrong.”

This smacks of paradox, but its roughly how science works. ‘Yellow brick’ is a placeholder model for an unattainable truth which stands to be refined or dismissed. And the fact that it clashes with human intuition and cognitive bias is why the scientific method has to be beaten into people. Also why many of us who allegedly practice it fail so spectacularly at it. (Recent review article in Nature says that less than 10% of preclinical cancer research can reproduced!)

More paradoxical is something like “I know that the house across the street from me is the house across the street from me, but I might be wrong.”

This too is part of the scientific method, but in order to actually practice science we have to ignore certain axiomatic assumptions about existence/reality and get on with hypoethesis testing.

This is the $64,000 question — the question of what is ‘natural.’ If you’re attuned to it, you can find appeals, under various guises or formulations, to what is ‘natural’ all over the place. Usually, though, a bit of reflection is sufficient (or at least, one would hope it’s sufficient!) to reveal that the putatively ‘natural’ is merely conventional. As John Stuart Mill put it: “So true is it that unnatural generally means only uncustomary, and that everything which is unusual appears unnatural.”

I tend to think that human beings as we know them — human beings as we are — cannot be cleanly bifurcated into ‘natural’ and ‘social,’ into ‘nature’ and ‘nurture.’ The two run together. (Indeed, the theory of evolution tells us that, given a sufficiently long time-scale, there is no ‘nature’: our ‘nature’ is itself the variable, still-evolving product of our ‘nurturing’ environments!)

When it comes to implicit philosophical views held by the ‘folk,’ I suspect that there is no such thing as a ‘natural’ view on such matters. Kant believed that human reason inevitably leads us down the path to metaphysics, specifically with regard to freedom, God, and the immortality of the soul — but though these are exceedingly common metaphysical views (i.e., that God exists, that we are free, that the soul is immortal), I doubt they are ‘natural’ in any sense deserving of the name, let alone necessary.

The question of ‘comparative implicit metaphysics’ is really fascinating, I think. I know people have argued that the ancient Greeks were not, by and large, dualists, until philosophy started muddying the waters of Homeric/Hesiodic worldviews. If that’s right, then they differ from us in that respect. I think they also differed regarding our implicit assumption of human freedom.

On your other point, regarding knowledge, defeasibility, and science — is it really right to say that science embraces fallibilist knowledge, or just that it operates on the basis of suspension of judgment? In other words, you say that, with respect to my knowledge of that the building across the street from me is made of yellow brick, scientists will use ‘yellow brick’ as a ‘placeholder’ for an X that may or may not be confirmed. Wouldn’t it follow, then, that they would not hold, prior to confirmation, that “the building is made of yellow brick” counts as knowledge?

This was Heidegger’s quest: given (something like) conceptual path dependency, and given how bad we are at theoretical conceptualization, all things being equal, the whole of philosophy likely teeters on some basic mistake made at the ‘beginning.’ So you go back to the Pre-socratics, convince yourself your Ancient Greek isn’t theory-laden, and begin wanking away.

My present inclination is to think there was no ‘original’ (or what we really mean, ‘virginal’) ‘position.’ We just had no fucking clue and no fucking discourse. Now we have no fucking clue and a mountain of discourse (good to see you bogged down on the North Ridge, Roger!).

I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been wondering about concepts like ‘aboutness’ and what makes them seem so ‘natural’ or ‘intuitive.’ Do we have an ‘aboutness device’ (like the famous HADD, hyperactive agency detection device), or is it a cognitive lacuna that language papered over, providing the ground for conceptualization and condiminium projects. Word and object are simply delivered as ‘related,’ and philosophy, in the total absence of any other information, simply runs from there. Makes me think I need to go back and read Quine. *shudders*

Roger wrote:
“Wouldn’t it follow, then, that they would not hold, prior to confirmation, that “the building is made of yellow brick” counts as knowledge?”

The way I would answer this is that science has no problem calling imperfect models ‘knowledge’ so long as they are practical and fruitful. Call it the “a-bombs and eradicated smallpox” version of truth.

(Note: I’m not sure if this properly addresses your question, but even if it does, I’m aware that I’m biting a bullet here and really redefining how most people would use the word knowledge)

Roger, I am interested to hear what you think is the reason for the usual human practice of justifying our beliefs. Why do we do it? Does it serve any purpose? I realize that you may not neccesarily be an adherent of evolutionary psychology, but still justification is a common enough behavior, that certain questions about it do not seem unreasonable. What, if any, are the advantages of thinking this way?

Figure 2c is kinda scary. First you start off with everyone being a dickhead, then everyone gets smart and plays ti-for-tat, then everyone smokes a joint and does Kumbaya, and suddenly WHAM dark ages again.

I remember there being an argument from Maynard-Smith that we shouldn’t expect natural populations to oscillate strategies like that, but whatever, it’s a computer simulation.

Also, I like how by evolving a synthetic neural network haphazardly they managed to construct “rational strategies”. There’s evidence to support the idea that during development, the brain does something very similar, using a local version of natural selection to strengthen networks that give desired outputs while killing those that do not. Another $64,000 question then: do most people share a roughly equivalent hidden-layer structure in key cognitive neural processes?

I would assume that an evolutionary-psychological account of human justificatory practices would appeal to sociality, the need or drive for communal consensus as it’s tied to various evolutionarily advantageous behaviors. Even within philosophy, where such things are supposed to be superseded, most justifications involve appeals to some sort of extra-personal authority. From an historical perspective, these issues — which can seem so ‘abstract,’ so removed from our lives — take on a visceral aspect: the felt need for communal consensus (unmovable justifications) have given rise to such things as the Inquisition. Challenging prevailing justificatory standards commonly used to lead to being burned alive.

That’s one perspective on it. But I also want to say something else. There’s a sense in which justificatory practices only arise in the face of challenges. Most people don’t go around justifying themselves all the time (at least, not in the way I’m thinking, i.e., not regarding their fundamental implicit commitments). Why not? Because, for the most part, we’re surrounded by people who share our fundamental implicit commitments. One way of reading the history of ancient Greek philosophy is as the history of the emergence of challenges to traditional epistemic authority, sources of traditional communal consensus — abiding justificatory structures, in other words. Plato’s early dialogues dramatize this. In the Euthyphro, the titular interlocutor starts out convinced that he is justified (regarding his knowledge of what piety is), but only implicitly, i.e., in a way that fails to see the need for justification. Then Socrates comes along and challenges him to make his implicit justifications explicit. To the reader of the dialogue, it is obvious that Euthyphro utterly fails, that in fact he’s a jackass who doesn’t know shit. But Euthyphro himself leaves the dialogue in the same state in which he entered it: blissfully certain that he’s justified in a way that doesn’t even require justification.

All of us are, most of the time, in precisely this state, I think. It’s what Hegel meant by ‘natural consciousness,’ that attitude according to which our particular conceptual scheme shows up for us as immediate and certain, as though it were read straight off the face of Nature Herself. For this reason, most of our ‘justificatory practices’ are local affairs and not the sort of thing I have in mind (for instance, ‘justifying’ oneself regarding one’s opinion concerning who will or will not win the Super Bowl). Such local justificatory practices are for the most part either attempts to convince others or attempts to reach consensus, or both. Deeper justificatory practices, where fundamental commitments are seen as requiring justification in the first place, are relatively rare.

Ok, so shifting focus slightly. It seems to me that Pyrrhonism, or at least the primary argument that you have presented against justification, is dependent on the absolute distinction between first order and second order beliefs. In other words (in brief), second order justification of first order beliefs leads inevitably to infinite regress. However, what about the concepts of “first order” and “second order”? Leaving aside for the moment that I have not yet presented an argument, what happens if the distinction is undermined? What if the situation is far fuzzier than Aristotlean logic allows for? So, what if rather than ‘A’ and ‘Not A’, we have ‘Kind of A’ and ‘Mostly Not A’? Or just ‘Beliefs’?

In the Euthyphro, the titular interlocutor starts out convinced that he is justified (regarding his knowledge of what piety is), but only implicitly, i.e., in a way that fails to see the need for justification. Then Socrates comes along and challenges him to make his implicit justifications explicit. To the reader of the dialogue, it is obvious that Euthyphro utterly fails, that in fact he’s a jackass who doesn’t know shit. But Euthyphro himself leaves the dialogue in the same state in which he entered it: blissfully certain that he’s justified in a way that doesn’t even require justification.

It’s so appropriate that you would choose this example. After all, a close examination of the dialogue shows that Euthyphro actually is at least partially justified in holding to his knowledge of what piety is, because Socrates fails in his attempt to construct the dilemma, and by his own admission cheats in constructing it by utilizing a switch as material, if less egregious, as the one you utilized in your Pyrrhonism posts.

“I will amend the definition so far as to say that what all the gods hate is impious, and what they love pious or holy; and what some of them love and others hate is both or neither. Shall this be our definition of piety and impiety?”

This amended definition of what is pious is quite clearly a vastly reduced subset of what any one particular god loves, while Euthyphro could have supported his position and shown Socrates to be incorrect by simply pointing out that it would be just as valid to define “the pious” as “what one or more god loves”.

Anyhow, at least you have the solace of knowing you have successfully upheld philosophy’s long tradition of devious intellectual dishonesty.

It did show up. Much like the Buddha has infinite compassion for all, the Badg-ha has infinite creepy for all, and so you are included! Indeed I bit my tongue writing that – he doth move in mysterious ways…!

Why are you so quick to dismiss the “uninformative” version of externalism? In particular, why are you uncomfortable “not knowing” in this externalist sense but instead argue for “not knowing” in the skeptical sense?

I never claimed, nor would any good reader suppose that I had intended, to provide a complete interpretation of Pyrrhonism. I left out ataraxia even though it is obviously central to any complete account of Pyrrhonism. But given that I did not mention it, Vox is bound by the principle of charity to interpret my claims about Pyrrhonism as claims that are separable from claims about ataraxia. He has failed in that. Moreover, all he’s done is present his own, flat-footed reading of the texts in opposition to my more nuanced account.

Correction: All I have done is present a textually accurate reading of the texts in opposition to your fictional account. I have no doubt that you think piling more of your bullshit on top of the heaping, steaming mass you previously produced will snow a number of those people who don’t have the patience to go through it in detail, but, as you know, I do have the patience and I shall very much enjoy going through and pointing out all the new errors and attempts to deceive you have committed in trying to cover your previously exposed ass.

As a larval academic, you clearly do not understand that there is no principle of intellectual charity. I am not bound by that figment of your imagination; no one is. And the rationale for your appeal to it is obvious, as anyone can see by looking at the bizarre claim insisting that charity means one must “interpret my claims about Pyrrhonism as claims that are separable from claims about [an obviously central Pyrrhonian concept]. You simply can’t legitimately make the sort of claims you did about Pyrrhonism while leaving out its central aim.

I have to say that you have been a wonderful poster boy for the deceptive academic style of argument. I particularly enjoy your constant claims to have been misunderstood, when you know perfectly well that I am one of the few who understood from the beginning what you were attempting to do with your bait-and-switch concerning your claim of the way in which the impossibility of philosophers possessing philosophically defined knowledge proves that non-philosophers don’t know anything in their various non-philosophical manners.

The core of the issue is that you committed a fundamental category error in attempting to tie your philosophy to the TPB theme. As one of my readers correctly noted, “he screwed up by trying to kiss Scott’s ass”. Anyhow, I look forward to adding my critical analysis of this response to the Dissecting series.